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-- French proverb

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Harriet Casdin-Silver works at the height of her powers, arguably the most significant artist ever committed to holography as a primary medium and generally acknowledged as holography's preeminent senior figure. The present installation, "A Celebration of Aging," her most recent large-scale project, produced in collaboration with the sound artist Kevin Brown, surely ranks as her most complex achievement in this form to date, and certainly constitutes one of the most remarkable works ever realized via this recalcitrant and problematic image-making process.

"A Celebration of Aging" functions as a multimedia time capsule, but on multiple levels at once -- a time capsule cubed, so to speak. Each hologram, in effect, encodes a slice of encapsulated time. Moreover, the project gathers together the appearances and recollections of ten people whose individual lives stretch back across almost the entire twentieth century, constructing a repository of their collective experience, an archive of lives lived at the end of the last millennium, preserving traces of them and and transmitting that into the future just as more traditional time capsules do. Yet it also acknowledges these diverse individuals -- male and female; gay and straight; Asian American, African American and Jewish; European emigrŽ and U.S.-born -- as invaluable time capsules themselves, keepers of our cultural memory, guardians of history. (Not coincidentally, Casdin-Silver refers to those she selected to portray as "honorees.")

The complete piece comprises eight large-scale holographic portraits of nine people in their 80s and 90s, plus one of Casdin-Silver --who, having turned 76 this past February, is the youngster among them. Commissioned for and originally presented at Boston's "First Night 2000" at the end of December 1999, "A Celebration" in its full, complete form arranges these startling, oversize head shots in a wide circle, enabling viewers to see the pieces from both the front and back.¹ Eight of these white-light transmission holograms measure 42x32 inches; the ninth, which portrays two women, Dorothy Taylor and Nora Lee Singletary, is 42x48 inches. Produced in Casdin-Silver's Boston studio, the images from which the final holograms derive begin with her subjects standing as motionless as possible on a specially designed turntable that rotates slowly while, with a camera, the artist and her assistant make 250 exposures of them on one strip of photographic film.

After conventional processing of that film strip, 180 of those exposures are chosen for the final portrait. Next, at a computerized holography lab, each of those frames is made into a holographic image, after which -- in a holographic version of the photomontage process -- all of that light from all those exposures is projected onto the emulsion of the holographic film that constitutes the finished portrait. To complete the work, that film is developed via a darkroom process similar to photography. The result? A transparent sheet bearing the image that is suspended from the ceiling in the exhibition space, literally and symbolically looming large. Because these are holograms, and their subjects inevitably shifted position and changed facial expression slightly during the course of those exposures, their motion is encoded in the finished portrait -- so that, as one moves around these pieces, they not only fulfill their illusion of three-dimensionality but also come startlingly to life.

Additionally, each portrait has the accompaniment of a transparent "audio dome" designed by Kevin Brown that hangs inconspicuously overhead and in front of the portrait, devised to provide a distinctive, self-contained aural environment. Brown, who recalls that he "approached Harriet with the concept of combining the two technologies," says of his invention that it "focuses sound on your ears . . . [and] gives you an almost holographic audio image."² When positioned beneath any particular dome, the visitor encounters an extended autobiographical narrative -- a self-portrait, in effect, by the image's subject, a chunk of oral history made all the more engrossing by the simultaneous visual engagement with this most credible of all representations of the speaker's visage.

Casdin-Silver and Brown conducted the taped interviews from which these edited versions derive, evoking their subjects' reminscences about life in the century just ended and their projections for the one just begun. These are often tough and painful stories -- of attempting suicide in Switzerland as a Jew facing deportation during World War Two; of working for twenty cents an hour as a domestic; of life as an "out" gay man and female impersonator in 1950s Texas; of seeing the great African American singer Marian Anderson refused permission to perform at Constitution Hall in our nation's capitol by the Daughters of the American Revolution. They are survivors' tales, with much to tell us about the past and profound implications for the future. In combination with the holograms, they provide a multi-faceted, polyvocal, firsthand testimony that acknowledges many of the social traumas and spiritual triumphs of the last century. Nonetheless, the expectations for the decades to come expressed by these individuals bearing witness to the past, while leavened with their hard-earned wisdom, indicate that everything they've gone through and seen has left them feeling neither defeated nor hopeless.

"A Celebration" would certainly have considerable power had the portraits been rendered as traditional photographs; but the uncanny sense of presence that radiates from the holographic representations adds a haunting dimension of immediacy to these images, encouraging one to imagine what it will feel like for audiences a century hence to step into this time capsule and engage with its occupants from that perspective. Only holography yields this effect, and here it's married brilliantly to the content and purpose of the work.

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While more than a few artists have tried their hands at generating a hologram or two, Casdin-Silver -- who produced her first holograms in 1968 -- has made a life's work of it, and much of her success comes from the thinking in this form that resulted from such immersion. Though she began her career as an artist by working with traditional media, once she embraced technology (starting in the mid-1960s), she never looked back; and, as Nick Capasso points out, she was "among the very first artists to experiment with holography, and among the very few to stick with this demanding and sometimes frustrating new medium."³

That commitment resulted in many breakthroughs for the medium, which in turn brought Casdin-Silver recognition as one of its champions and pioneers. But her real achievement goes beyond technological innovation and cogent inquiry into holography's formal properties. Casdin-Silver's work does not hide behind its complexity of facture; instead, it uses its fascinating form to engage the viewer with its content. This long-term body of work deals directly and recurrently with issues of gender, aging, and sexuality, sometimes all at once. Interestingly, its technological uniqueness appears to not only entrance audiences but also allow them to engage with these controversial issues.

Casdin-Silver, who considers aging "one of the most important issues in society and art," hopes that this work will help its audiences "to look on [aging] as a profound, exciting experience."⁴ She has not come to this subject either recently or casually. Nor does she approach aging with personal reticence, or examine it only through the representation of others. (In 1998, shortly before she set to work on "A Celebration," she produced the larger-than-life-sized, unabashedly erotic nude double self-portrait, "70+1+2.") "A Celebration of Aging" seems like a logical, indeed an inevitable, outgrowth of a life devoted to embracing the technological, considering it critically, and directing it toward personal expression and socially provocative ends. "This may be my masterpiece," the artist suggests. "At the end, it came out so well that I did myself."⁵

Early on in her engagement with holography, Harriet Casdin-Silver wrote, "I visualize a holography appreciated for the mystery and glory of light, a holography humanized, stripped of technical virtuosity, a medium with which is experienced a free articulation of resonant form."⁶ With this stunning work she has accomplished all that and more -- exceeding even her own expectations, it appears. "I wanted to do very large holograms, larger than I'd ever done before. I wanted them to be monumental. . . . I had a vision -- a glorious installation. But I was totally unprepared for it working as well as it did," she declares. "I think this is the first art installation I've ever done that I was almost completely happy with. And I can't wait to put it back up again."⁷

Notes

¹ This requires more space than many venues can provide; hence, while an extract from "A Celebration" has been shown since its debut, and a smaller-scale version of one portrait -- that of Alice Mitchell -- has entered the permanent collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, the work has not been seen in its entirety since its Boston premiere.

² From Marilyn Kass, Harriet Casdin-Silver and Kevin Brown: "A Celebration of Aging'"-- an unpublished videotape, 2000, documenting the Boston installation of the work.

³ Nick Capasso, "Harriet Casdin-Silver: The Art of Holography," in Harriet Casdin-Silver: The Art of Holography (Lincoln, Mass.: DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 1998), p. 19. Capasso curated this retrospective of the artist's work.

⁴ Kass, op. cit.

⁵ Quoted in Cate McQuaid, "3-D History: 'A Celebration of Aging,'" in "First Night 2000," a special supplement to The Boston Globe, Vol. 25, no. 10, December 30, 1999, pp. 19-20.

⁶ Quoted in Lawrence Alloway, "Introduction," 5 Artists/5 Technologies (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), unpaginated.

⁷ Kass, op. cit.

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This essay originally appeared in the exhibition catalogue ???, 2001). © Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.